{"id":2261,"date":"2018-10-11T23:29:25","date_gmt":"2018-10-12T03:29:25","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/ninecrows.com\/career\/?p=2261"},"modified":"2018-10-11T14:30:05","modified_gmt":"2018-10-11T18:30:05","slug":"recent-e-book-purchases","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/ninecrows.com\/career\/2018\/10\/11\/recent-e-book-purchases\/","title":{"rendered":"Recent E-Book Purchases"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p>Packt publishing, Manning and APress have been key sources of software related books for a variety of topics. Lately they&#8217;ve also been pushing out daily deals on eBooks that have grabbed my attention in a number of cases. Packt in particular has deep discounts on selected books (and often even deeper discounts if you buy all four on a given day) so they&#8217;re over represented in my list.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>I tend to buy on a wide range of software topics as my preferred roles touch on all aspects of the engineering process and having some background across that range improves my effectiveness immensely. I&#8217;ve listed my purchase prices to give an idea of how deep these discounts go.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\"><li><a href=\"https:\/\/www.packtpub.com\/game-development\/game-programming-using-qt-5-beginners-guide-second-edition\">Game Programming using Qt 5 Beginner&#8217;s Guide<\/a> &#8211; Second Edition ($8.00) Aug<br\/>QT keeps coming up in discussions of C++ based UI programming. It is cross platform and seems to be well supported while the Microsoft specific alternatives all have limitations and most are seriously showing their age.<\/li><li><a href=\"https:\/\/www.packtpub.com\/application-development\/hands-gui-programming-c-and-qt5\">Hands-On GUI Programming with C++ and Qt5 <\/a>($7.20) Aug<br\/>Another QT book covering core QT programming (the games book sounded interesting as it likely covers more graphical and interactive QT). I&#8217;m going to have to find time to do some sandbox programming with QT sometime soon.<\/li><li><a href=\"https:\/\/www.packtpub.com\/application-development\/qt5-python-gui-programming-cookbook\">Qt5 Python GUI Programming Cookbook<\/a>\u00a0($8.00) Aug<br\/>Combines python and QT as an interesting mix. Python also keeps showing up out there and being able to build QT UI tools with python on the back-end would be quite useful in places.<\/li><li><a href=\"https:\/\/www.packtpub.com\/application-development\/fixing-bad-ux-designs\">Fixing Bad UX Designs<\/a> ($6.40) Aug<br\/>I&#8217;ve tended to operate mostly in the middle and bottom ends of software stacks in the past. I&#8217;m trying to improve my feel for the user experience end of things and the UX books on my list support this effort.<\/li><li><a href=\"https:\/\/www.packtpub.com\/web-development\/hands-uxui-design-developers\">Hands-On UX Design for Developers<\/a> ($6.40) Aug<br\/>A more general purpose UX book.<\/li><li><a href=\"https:\/\/www.packtpub.com\/game-development\/unity-2018-example-second-edition\">Unity 2018 By Example &#8211; Second Edition<\/a> ($7.20) Aug<br\/>I&#8217;d love to find time to build some simple games&#8230;particularly if I can combine interesting game play with a networked back end. Unity seems like one of the best ways to make this happen so I&#8217;ve been slowly reading enough to find my way around (also one of the reasons for my blender reading).<\/li><li><a href=\"https:\/\/www.packtpub.com\/game-development\/unity-virtual-reality-projects-second-edition\">Unity Virtual Reality Projects &#8211; Second Edition<\/a> ($8.00) Aug<br\/>I bought an HTC Vive quite some time ago and while it has been fun to play with (though currently buried in the basement as I sort through years of various items) I really want to do some programming. Unity and VR seem like a good combination&#8230;with C# on the back end even better.<\/li><li><a href=\"https:\/\/www.packtpub.com\/web-development\/hands-full-stack-web-development-angular-6-and-laravel-5\">Hands-On Full Stack Web Development with Angular 6 and Laravel 5<\/a> ($10.00) Sept<br\/>I bought this because Angular is high on my &#8216;web UI&#8217; list and my web hosting here is PHP only. This stuff could give me the ability to break free from WordPress a bit and put some more interesting content on the site.<\/li><li><a href=\"https:\/\/www.packtpub.com\/web-development\/react-cookbook\">React Cookbook<\/a> ($7.20) Oct<br\/>React (and Vue a bit) is the other web UI framework that seems to be popular. I&#8217;d like to become a bit more familiar with it when time permits.<\/li><li><a href=\"https:\/\/www.packtpub.com\/application-development\/react-and-react-native-second-edition\">React and React Native &#8211; Second Edition<\/a> ($7.20) Oct<br\/>Another React book with (hopefully) broader coverage and some React Native bits along the way. Web UI for the win?<\/li><li><a href=\"https:\/\/www.packtpub.com\/application-development\/d3js-quick-start-guide\">D3.js Quick Start Guide<\/a> ($2.40) Oct<br\/>Part of a set of four (thus the very low price) covering some odd corners of the web UI universe.<\/li><li><a href=\"https:\/\/www.packtpub.com\/web-development\/learn-webassembly\">Learn WebAssembly<\/a>\u00a0($3.60) Oct<br\/>I have been hearing about webassembly from a few people at work as an interesting technology. Hoping this book gives me some more depth on this front.<\/li><li><a href=\"https:\/\/www.packtpub.com\/web-development\/learn-threejs-third-edition\">Learn Three.js &#8211; Third Edition<\/a> ($3.60) Oct<br\/>I&#8217;ve been poking at three.js and WebGL for a while now. Another book on the three.js side can&#8217;t hurt and for the price I couldn&#8217;t turn this down.<\/li><li><a href=\"https:\/\/www.packtpub.com\/web-development\/mastering-svg\">Mastering SVG<\/a> ($3.60) Oct<br\/>SVG also keeps coming up at work and while I&#8217;m aware of the technology and its basic outlines, I&#8217;ve not dug deeper to date. Going to read through this one and see what I can pick up.<\/li><li><a href=\"https:\/\/www.manning.com\/books\/kotlin-in-action\">Kotlin in Action<\/a><br\/>Kotlin seems to be an interesting attempt to end-run the conservatism of the Java eco-system. I&#8217;ve been looking at it a bit for some time. So far I haven&#8217;t found time to do more than some reading though.<\/li><li><a href=\"https:\/\/www.manning.com\/books\/the-java-module-system\">The Java Module System<\/a> <br\/>Java 9 feature that I&#8217;d like to know a bit more about.<br\/><\/li><li><a href=\"https:\/\/www.manning.com\/books\/the-joy-of-kotlin\">The Joy of Kotlin<\/a><br\/>More on Kotlin.<\/li><li><a href=\"https:\/\/www.manning.com\/books\/web-components-in-action\">Web Components in Action<\/a><br\/>More web UI advanced topics.<\/li><li><a href=\"https:\/\/www.apress.com\/us\/book\/9781484227923#otherversion=9781484227930\">Clean C++<\/a><br\/>Hoping for some additional insights into modern (2011\/2014) C++ usage.<\/li><\/ul>\n\n\n\n<p><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Packt publishing, Manning and APress have been key sources of software related books for a variety of topics. Lately they&#8217;ve also been pushing out daily deals on eBooks that have grabbed my attention in a number of cases. Packt in particular has deep discounts on selected books (and often even deeper discounts if you buy &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/ninecrows.com\/career\/2018\/10\/11\/recent-e-book-purchases\/\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">Recent E-Book Purchases<\/span> <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[4,9,5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2261","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books","category-daily-blog","category-thoughts"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p7F2Qc-At","jetpack-related-posts":[],"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ninecrows.com\/career\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2261"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ninecrows.com\/career\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ninecrows.com\/career\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ninecrows.com\/career\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ninecrows.com\/career\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2261"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/ninecrows.com\/career\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2261\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2266,"href":"https:\/\/ninecrows.com\/career\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2261\/revisions\/2266"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ninecrows.com\/career\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2261"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ninecrows.com\/career\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2261"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ninecrows.com\/career\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2261"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}